Echoes Of The Intifada

Regional Repercussions Of The Palestinian-israeli Conflict

Rex Brynen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367016609
• eBook ISBN: 9780429714917
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Important historical turning points often seem to be unpredicted until they are upon us. For most observers (the author included) the Palestinian uprising that erupted in December 1987 was unexpected-not because the depth of Palestinian national aspirations or the growing strength of Palestinian socio-political organization under occupation were un

Part One
Israel and Palestine: Implications of the Intifada

Since its first eruption on 9 December 1987, the Palestinian uprising has continued at an ever-increasing cost. Hundreds of Palestinians and dozens of Israelis have died; thousands have been injured; tens of thousands of Palestinians have been arrested or detained without charge or trial.¹ Confrontations between armed Israeli troops or settlers and rock-throwing Palestinian protesters have become a daily event throughout the territories, including East Jerusalem. At times, the violence has even extended to within Israel itself.

As dramatic as events in the occupied territories have been, however, it is not in their tragic violence that their greatest significance lies. Above and beyond this, in a fashion ill-suited to hurried analysis or the fleeting attentions of a typical television newsclip, the intifada has wrought deep and fundamental changes in the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict. The uprising has ushered in a new era in Palestinian mass mobilization; it has altered the structure and dynamics of occupation; it has reshaped regional diplomacy, and the possibilities for regional conflict resolution. In all these dimensions the most striking effect of the intifada has been clear: the extent to which the uprising has served to re-orient the Arab-Israeli conflict back to its historic Palestinian-Israeli core.

Palestine and Israel

The inevitable collision between the Zionist movement (later, the state of Israel) and the Palestinian Arab people traces its roots to the founding of political Zionism in the late 19th century among European Jews. Faced with continuing anti-Semitism in Europe, the Zionist movement sought to build in Palestine a Jewish National Home. Such intentions met with resistance, faint at first, from the indigenous Arab population of Palestine, whose own national awakening had begun amidst the gradual collapse of the Ottoman Empire.² Palestinian aspirations to construct their own national society were increasingly beset by the challenge of European/Zionist immigration and settlement.

Prior to the First World War, therefore, local communal tension and rivalry between native Palestinians and immigrant Zionists was the central feature of the emergent conflict During the period between World War I and World War Π, external factors served to accentuate and accelerate this clash. Britain, which in the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 had pledged itself to support Zionist aspirations, gained control of formerly Ottoman-ruled Palestine under a League of Nations Mandate. Later, the specter of European fascism lent new urgency to the Zionist endeavor. Faced with persecution and extermination in Europe, denied refuge elsewhere, tens of thousands of European Jews sought safety in Palestine. The Jewish population of Palestine grew rapidly, from perhaps 11 percent of the total in 1922 to some 31 percent by 1947.³

During the first decade of the British Mandate, the struggle remained a local conflict between Jewish national aspirations and Palestinian demands for self-determination. Major Palestinian protests and riots erupted in 1920 and 1921, and again in 1929 and 1933. From 1936 to 1939 a popular Palestinian rebellion was launched against the Zionist enterprise and British colonial rule. The rebellion, however, ultimately collapsed in the months prior to the start of World War Π. After the war, this triangle of Palestinian-British-Zionist conflict was joined by the beginnings of serious US and United Nations involvement. The result was the UN partition resolution of 1947, the escalation of Arab-Jewish conflict, the establishment of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948, and a full-scale war involving Arab states.

This first Arab-Israeli war was ended by armistice agreements signed in the spring of 1949. The war itself had been decisively won by Israel. In its aftermath, construction of the Jewish state proceeded steadily in the three-quarters of historic Palestine that was now under Israeli control, and from which approximately three-quarters of a million Palestinians had been displaced. Two decades later, the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war saw the Gaza Strip and West Bank (including East Jerusalem) fall under Israeli occupation. A further 300,000 Palestinians were displaced from these territories. With this, all of historic Palestine came under Israel’s control, and half the Palestinian people had now become refugees.⁴

Yet the scope of Israel’s victories on the battlefield in 1948, 1956 and 1967 did little to resolve the Israeli/Palestinian dilemma. On the contrary, the conflict was only further sharpened.

For Palestinians, the dislocation, dispossession and exile that had befallen their society rendered it politically weak and physically divided. In the longer term, however, occupation at home and harassment abroad strengthened their socio-political identity, assuring the psychological and political foundations upon which continuing demands for self-determination would be based. In the Palestinian diaspora, shared bonds of national experience and the incentives and opportunities generated by political and economic marginality provided the essential ingredients for a resurgence of community and national organization during the 1950s and 1960s.⁵ By the late 1960s the Palestine Liberation Organization had emerged both as the organizational umbrella for much of this activity, and as the leading vehicle for the expression and pursuit of Palestinian national aspirations.

For Israel, the realities of controlling a growing Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip—however much the occupation may have enhanced its strategic position vis-à-vis regular Arab armies—locked it into a continuing effort to contain Palestinian aspirations for self-determination. A relatively modest military presence (and pervasive links of economic dependency) seemed, for two decades, sufficient to maintain physical control of the territories. For some Israelis, the apparent permanence of the occupation fueled hopes for Jewish settlement and annexation. Fen* others, it raised the specter of a “demographic dilemma,” namely, the contradiction between Israel’s Jewish identity, its democratic character, and its rule over a growing disenfranchised Palestinian population.

But, in many respects, these Israeli debates were beside the point. However much military occupation could keep an intimidated Palestinian population in line, it was evidently not enough to prevent a revitalization of Palestinian political identity and nationalist institutions. Indeed, the fact of occupation generally had the reverse of its intended effect, serving to spur political mobilization. For those who doubted the process, ample proof was provided by the local activities of the PLO-affiliated Palestine National Front (PNF, 1973–78) and the National Guidance Committee (NGC, 1978–82), by the overwhelming victory of pro-PLO candidates in the Israeli-supervised 1976 West Bank municipal elections, and in repeated waves of popular protest and resistance. Such pressures could be contained only so long. In December 1987 they finally burst forth in the form of a major Palestinian uprising.

Palestinians and the Uprising

Perhaps the most far-reaching effects of the uprising have been not in the political or diplomatic realm, but rather within the Palestinian community itself. In the West Bank and Gaza, the intifada has hastened remarkable changes in the socio-political structure of Palestinian society under occupation. Virtually all age groups and social classes have been mobilized in its support. But the uprising and the twenty-first year of occupation also signaled the coming-of-age of a new generation of activists and activism amongst Palestinians in the occupied territories. They represent a potent social force, one with little respect for Israeli administrative authority and less responsive to Israeli coercive measures.

The uprising has also brought with it (and been hastened by) changes in the pattern of Palestinian nationalist leadership in the West Bank and Gaza. It is a new leadership rooted not in traditional Palestinian “notable” politics, but rather in the social mechanisms and institutions that have developed in the territories since 1967: youth and women’s groups, student unions, trade unions, professional organizations, charitable associations, mosques and churches, and neighborhood popular committees. As Salim Tamari notes in his chapter on Palestinian strategy under occupation, these institutions have provided the “organizational crucible” for the uprising. They have also been a crucial element in its continuation, sustenance and survival. In the past, the high profile and individualism of Palestinian leadership in the territories—the PNF, NGC, and nationalist mayors—rendered it acutely vulnerable to deportation, detention, and other Israeli counter-measures. The current leadership of the intifada is more diffuse, and hence more effective and more resilient than its antecedents. The continuation of the uprising in spite of the detention of thousands is an indication that the intifada is a social movement rooted not in traditional patron-client politics but in a network of local community organization and activism.

Moreover, as Tamari also notes, the uprising has wrought considerable dislocation of the traditional structure of Israeli occupation within the Palestinian community. Some (if far from all) of the linkages of economic dependency have been weakened. Traditional conservative Palestinian notables, their political power already on the wane despite tacit joint Jordanian-Israeli sponsorship, have had their influence further undermined. All forms of collaboration with the Israeli civilian-military administration in the occupied territories have been severely curtailed. Through massive popular support and participation on the one hand, and local “strike forces” on the other, considerable levels of discipline have been maintained.⁶ In essence, then, the uprising has witnessed the development of a new, more militant, political culture among the majority of Palestinians, one more conducive to sustained protest, civil disobedience, initiative, and resistance.

Overall leadership of the uprising has been provided since January 1988 by al-qiyada al-wataniyya al-muwahhada li-l-intifada—the “Unified National Leadership of the Intifada.” The Unified National Leadership (UNLI) has acquired a powerful mantle of popular authority. Its periodic directives, issued through the uprising’s periodic underground leaflets, have become the agenda of the intifada, accepted by Palestinians with a remarkable degree of unanimity.

What are the implications of this for the established leadership of the Palestinian nationalist movement, the Palestine Liberation Organization? At the outset it must be noted that the Unified National Leadership (consisting of representatives from the major nationalist/PLO groups)⁷ proclaims itself the Unified National Leadership of the PL/O, an identification it restates with every underground leaflet. Far from challenging the position of the PLO, the intifada seems to have reconfirmed its near-universal acceptance by Palestinians both under occupation and in the diaspora as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.⁸

Yet it is also clear that the uprising has catalyzed important changes within the PLO, accelerating a shift—already hastened by the 1982 war in Lebanon—in the movement’s center of gravity from the diaspora to the occupied territories.

The November 1988 declaration of an independent Palestinian state by the Palestine National Council, PLO Chairman Yasir ‘Arafat’s statements before a special session of the UN General Assembly in Geneva in December, and months of formal US-PLO dialogue were all indicative of new directions assumed by the PLO under the impetus of the uprising. Certainly, much of this shift to an explicit two-state solution had already been underway, marked by a evolution of the PLO’s goal from a secular democratic state in all of Palestine (1969–74), to that of establishment of a “national authority” (1974) or an independent Palestinian state (1977) on any liberated Palestinian soil (i.e., the West Bank and Gaza Strip). What the uprising did do, however, was to alter both the political balance of power within the Palestinian movement and in the inter-Arab, Arab-Israeli and international arenas—creating the conditions under which a more explicit and dynamic version of this program could be actively pursued.

The Impact on Israel

Although its immediate impact on Israeli society and politics has been less substantial, the long-term implications of the uprising for the Jewish state are also profound. The intifada, it is true, has not challenged Israel’s ultimate preponderance of coercive power in the territories. It has, however, altered the dynamics of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For Israel, the uprising has rendered the occupation increasingly difficult and costly. Before the uprising, occupation seemed a relatively light burden to most Israelis. As Raja Shehadeh notes in his chapter on Palestinian human rights and the uprising, the cost of the Israeli civilian-military administration in the territories was more than matched by the “occupation tax” placed on its inhabitants, resulting in a net gain to the Israeli treasury. Additional economic benefits flowed to Israel in the form of water resources, trade, and especially access to a low-cost Palestinian reserve workforce.

As the intifada continued through its third year, Israel has had to confront the problems of fewer Palestinians working in Israel, a boycott of Israeli consumer goods, and a widespread (if only partially successful) campaign of non-payment of taxes in the territories. Israel is also faced with the increased expense of maintaining order amid the declining effectiveness of existing forms of social control. The consequent economic costs of the uprising to Israel’s economy have been severe.⁹ Moreover, as Shehadeh’s analysis suggests, the violence of Israel’s response to the uprising is indicative of the extent to which the occupation can no longer be maintained ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• INTRODUCTION: The Palestinian Uprising
• PART ONE: Israel and Palestine: Implications of the Intifada
• PART TWO: Regional Repercussions of the Uprising
• PART THREE: The Superpowers
• About the Editor and Contributors
• Index